This invention relates generally to medical devices, and, more specifically, to medicine dispensers for home health care which can assist patients in taking medications in dosages and at intervals as prescribed.
Some types of medical therapy require patients to take many different types of medications, often in the form of pills or capsules, at regular intervals. For invalid or ill and non-ambulatory patients, it is often desirable to minimize the number of trips to the physician or pharmacist to obtain the required amounts of medication for the therapy involved. Even for many ambulatory patients it is highly desirable to minimize the disruption caused by trips to a physician or pharmacist.
It has been found that sometimes when the physician attempts to accommodate the patient's convenience and prescribes a sufficient amount of medication for an extended period, for example one month, the different amounts and types of medications become so large that it is extremely burdensome and difficult for the patient to keep track of proper medication frequency and dosage. Moreover, it has been found that some patients find it difficult to keep track of which medications have been taken and the last time such medications were taken for purposes of maintaining the prescribed schedule. Such problems sometimes lead to the patient accidentally taking an overdose of some medications and/or not taking a sufficient dosage of others.
In an attempt to prevent such accidental overdoses and ensure that a proper medication schedule is followed, many physicians and pharmacists have recommended that accurate records be kept of the different times particular medications were taken. Even this requirement, however, has failed to be completely satisfactory because some patients either refuse to follow the physician's advice and maintain the necessary records, or they simply find record keeping a meaningless chore and neglect their responsibilities.
In addition to the foregoing, some patients requiring many medications at regular intervals are in such discomfort that the simple task of remembering a proper dosage or a time interval for taking a particular medication is in itself unduly burdensome. Although such patients often could benefit from long term medical therapy utilizing multiple medications at regular intervals, some physicians have hesitated to prescribe more than a few days of medication at any one time for fear of accidental overdoses.
Accordingly, there has been a need for a medicine dispenser designed for use in the home to assist those required to take medications at regular intervals. Such a medicine dispenser should be of durable construction, be easy to assemble and operate, and eliminate the need to keep error-free written records of dosages and time intervals prescribed. Additionally, there exists a need for a medicine dispenser which minimizes the chance of an accidental overdose or underdose of medications, and which can be constructed to ensure that only a particular combination of medications is acceptable to the device. In particular, such an improved device should allow a pharmacist to prepare the required medications, and place such medications in a tray or the like which the pharmacist knows can only be used with a corresponding medicine dispenser utilized by the patient. Further, a medicine dispenser is needed which can signal to the patient when and what kind of a particular medication is to be taken. The present invention fulfills these needs and provides other related advantages.